Debt Rattle July 1 2016

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Harris&Ewing Oil for salads 1918 • Japan Deflation Intensifies (R.) • Japan’s Prices Keep Falling in Challenge to Abe, Kuroda (BBG) • China QE Dwarfs
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 1 2016]

[Dr. Diablo]

I suspect from anthropological, cultural, and verbal evidence that North America used to have a lot more seasonal variability than the incredibly placid rise out of the Little Ice Age that we’re used to. There are stories of microbursts and possibly massive ocean storms while, although it was introduced long before, agriculture was steadily rising as the weather warmed out of 1400-1500 bottom.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png/450px-2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

Point? If we return out of unnaturally placid period into a far more variable weather common before 1100, we would need to revive the old pre-1100 technologies. Those periods were marked by an enormous breadth of food supply compared to today, both in Euro-style small farms, but more especially in the non-coastal U.S. where Continental weather even now can move between 80 degrees and snow in hours (e.g. Minnesota). Native food production they call “wild” “primitive” “hunting and gathering” by all the usual idiots too dumb to pick up a shovel and understand what they were doing. Native agriculture was essentially permaculture, which depended on carefully tended food forests, bushes, wild herbs and plants, coupled with excruciating care in food sources like perfectly clear waterways, fish runs, mussel beds, migratory birds, deer and buffalo, etc.

So if the weather’s bad? No matter how bad SOMETHING comes in each year. No corn, as happened in 1815 explosion of Tambora? There is fish, game and potherbs. Too wet for for wheat? There are cattails, arrowroot, berries, rye, fruit trees, etc. But what you’re trading is efficiency (maximum yield) for security (maximum security), and generally they’re opposites. That’s physics. We’re already past the horizon on efficiency vs. resiliency and we’re complaining we can’t go even further? That maybe we’d have to change and admit our ways are not so perfect? Awww.

So if you suspect weather will be less perfect, better get cracking on selling off the mega factory farms and monoculture and get back to very small scale, highly diverse family farms, perhaps focusing on far more resilient tree/forest culture. Then they might find out the reason we never did monoculture before wasn’t because we were primitive and stupid, but because until 1800-1900, the weather wouldn’t support such dangerous nonsense.

And it may not again. Let’s not cry over returning to normal weather on earth.

[Nassim]

Funny how often they come out with an “end of world scenario” – bit like the guys one used to see who carried “The END is Nigh” signs.

It is almost as though they only just realised that the world’s climate is dynamic.

[Author]

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